This was our direction or challenge

We want to become a Quality Assistance team. We will make it easier for developers to own the execution of our test cases such that we assist them build defect-free code. We’ll do this by having a culture of easy ownership so we can swarm to solve problems and collectively free up our team’s time and having a culture of continuous improvement where we keep looking for better ways of working.

I should emphasise that the improvements were not intended to make individual efficiency by optimising locally. They had to optimise globally by taking a systems thinking view of our goal. The team had to continually improve by making it easier for others to own more of their tasks. My idea was inspired from a Netflix AWS presentation about how they made it easier for developers to own ops related tasks. What does easy ownership look like? The manual tester had to write tests so clearly that there would be no assumed knowledge needed to run it by

  1. A manual tester to help them execute the test cases if they were running late.
  2. A test automation developer to help them run the tests faster and eventually auto-generate the test automation code to run it earlier.
  3. A developer to inject all the data they needed to run the test in their dev environment and produce virtually defect-free code. We wanted to make the right thing, the easy thing to do.

The COBOL testers had a way of swarming to solve a problem before I got there. They wrote their tests in a great detail. The benefit of this was that if someone finished their work earlier, they would help someone who was running behind. When more of the larger team worked this way, then whereas someone helping in the past slowed a tester down because of the overhead of explaining stuff, they were now finishing the work faster.